Sometimes when that happened long ago the ships were the old-fashioned kind with treasure in them. And now and then you’d see a helicopter going low over Half Mile Reef and heading east to Boca Chica and Saddlebunch and Loggerhead with the men looking down to see if they could find the treasure ships. And once a whole bunch of skin-divers moored their boat off Half Mile Reef and did a lot of swimming around to see what they could find, but they didn’t find anything. I didn’t like them because skin-divers are the stupidest kind of people, always showing off, but Cole and Lettie had a good week selling them sandwiches and beer, so that was all right. Any time Cole and Lettie did good business they would stop being sour a little while, and I could take a breath.
When Avery’s barge hit the reef I was at the cove with Sebastiano, and it was like watching a movie when the sound goes off. At first I didn’t think anything about it, because I was lying there half listening to Sebastiano read the old New York paper to me that he got from Cole for a couple of papayas, but then Sebastiano stopped reading all of a sudden and said, “Look.” When I sat up and looked I saw that he was pointing out to the head of the reef where a tugboat was pulling a big barge at the end of a long tow. That was when it became like a movie without the sound. Even the birds flapping around weren’t making any noise, so it was all dead quiet while I watched.
The tow was too long, and the barge was riding very high so that the wind was swinging it into the reef. The tug knew that, too, and was turning almost due south trying to get clear, but it was no use. The next thing I knew, the barge struck and came to a dead stop, heeling a little, and I could see the towline snap and go flying in the air back onto the deck of the tug with the men there dodging to get out of the way.
“Aha,” Sebastiano said, “plenty of driftwood now,” but he was wrong. The tug made a circle and inched up alongside the barge, and then it started to work her off the reef. After a long time, I could see it had gotten the barge clear and was still lashed alongside, moving it away at about a mile a year. I knew they’d never try for Key West, the way the barge was down at the head dipping even lower every time it met a swell, so I knew then that Mooney’s Key would be having company.
That was early morning, and it took almost all day for the tug to make it around to the dock in front of the house. I was in the kitchen along with Lettie when we heard Cole yelling out on the dock, and we went to see. The tug had the barge near the dock and what he was yelling was that he didn’t want the barge moored to the dock. “You moor it there and it goes down, it’ll take my dock right along with it,” he told the tug captain who was hanging out of the pilothouse window looking even madder than Cole. “Then who pays me?”
“I don’t give a goddam who pays you,” the captain said back, and he was just like any man—mad at everybody else because he knew he was dead wrong and had made a mess of things. “You want me to cut loose this thing and let it go down here so you can have it? Is that what you want, you goddam Conch wrecker?”
Then some of the tug crew hanging over the rail saw Lettie and me and started whistling and calling out to us. Lettie walked on the dock and gave them a look that shut them up quick. Lettie could do that to people. She looked up at the captain and said, “You’re a fine one to talk, you and your Gulfport scum. You got insurance on this thing?”
“What do you think?”
Lettie turned to Cole. “You hear what the man said? And it’s high tide now, so why can’t he beach it here and patch it up that way? And you can get Felix and a couple of other men and help him.” It was something Cole never would have thought of, but Lettie was always more of a man than Cole.
So that was what they did. They beached the barge as high as they could, and when the tide was out they opened her sea-cock and let the water out and worked inside of her day after day. The tug ferried wood and stuff from Key West and berthed there most of the time, but a couple of the crew worked along with Felix and a friend of his from the Turtle Crawl doing enough on the barge to at least get it up the coast, because that’s where it was going—all the way to New York.
And that was how I got to know Avery. He was the barge captain, and the insurance man told him he had to stay with it all the time because of the lumber and tools lying around. Some people in the Keys had a bad name for being kind of light-fingered about any loose lumber and tools they came across, but the way that insurance man talked you’d think we were all a bunch of thieves. Anyhow, Avery was there all the time, and it was hard not to take notice of him right from the beginning.
He was a strange one, Avery, bigger than any of the others and with that mop of gray hair he never combed and those pale eyes that never seemed to be seeing you even when he was looking right at you. He was like Moses in the movies but without the beard, and he was full of religion. I found that out right away. Lettie made a deal to cook for the ones that stayed around, and the first time I brought breakfast into the restaurant and put it down in front of Avery, who came in ahead of anybody else, he ducked his head and clasped his hands together and said grace and kept saying it until I began to wonder. Then he stopped and said to me, “Why do you look like that? Don’t you say grace for God’s food?”
I said, “It all depends on how it’s cooked,” but he didn’t think that was funny. His eyes opened so big and crazy that I backed away from the table, and he said, “It’s all God’s food! God put it on this table. God will provide. Hear the Word! Man is made in the image of God, but he breeds only evil. The Devil is in him to breed evil!” And then he lifted both his hands up high and looked at the ceiling and he sounded just like Moses in the movies. “And the great dragon was cast out,” he said, “that old serpent called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world, he was cast out into the earth!”
I thought, this is a real crazy one for sure, and I backed away still more, but he pointed at me and his eyes were doing a job all over me. “Naked,” he said. “Naked and wanton out of Babylon!”
That made me mad. “I am not!” I said. “And you better quit calling names. If I tell Cole about it, you know what’ll happen to you?”
“But I see your flesh. Why do you show your flesh to men? Cover it.”
There was such a change in him that it surprised me. It sounded like begging, the way he said it.
I said, “Will you quit talking like that? This is my house and I can wear anything I want in it. And whatever you don’t want to see, you can just shut your eyes. Maybe that’ll help.”
He thought I was serious. “If the Devil wants me to see, how will it help to shut my eyes?” he said, and he was begging so hard that it wasn’t funny.
That was how I got to know him, with all his craziness showing. And after that there was no getting away from him. No matter where I was, all I had to do was turn around and there he was. If I was out in front of the house he would sit on the porch. If I was on the back steps cleaning fish or peeling shrimps he would be standing there, and then like an old dog that isn’t sure if you’ll hit him or not he would work closer to the steps and finally sit down and maybe even help me with the fish. And if I was waiting on people in the restaurant he might not be there to start with, but sooner or later I’d see him sitting off in a corner. Not eating or drinking, but just sitting there. And I could swear from the way his lips moved that he was praying to himself.
Sometimes he talked to me. He had hired on as barge captain in New Orleans, but he had been to a lot of other places and he would tell me about them. Of course, it was all mixed up with how God and the Devil were always fighting over those places, but outside of that it was interesting to hear about them. That wasn’t the only way he was mixed up. Everything seemed to be twisted around in him, so that when he would be talking in the friendliest way I had the feeling he hated me enough to kill me, and then when he would be talking in the most hateful way about me and other women and what we did to men, I had the feeling he had ideas about me just like Yeager and the tourists and the rest of them. But I didn’t mind w
ith him, because he was so religious. And because he could be real friendly, like the time we were talking on the back steps and Cole came out to tell me to get at my work, and Avery said to him, “Later, friend.”
Cole said, “You ain’t any friend of mine, mister. But she’s my daughter, and she goddam better get at her work right away.”
Then Avery stood up, and he looked like Moses standing on the mountain holding up that stone for the people to see. “Blasphemer,” he said. “Taking the Lord’s name in vain. Is that the way you talk to a man marked as a servant of God?” and he ran his finger over his forehead where you could see a thin white streak from an old cut or something. “For the angel from the east cried out, saying hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees, till we have sealed God’s servants on their foreheads! Look at that mark. Even a beer-bellied water-rat must know what it means and not blaspheme at it!”
Cole started backing away like I did the first time Avery scared me with his wild talk. “Now what did I do?” he said. “I ask my own daughter to tend to her work, and you make me out a sinner for it. I ain’t any sinner, mister. You take my word for that. I’m just an old, one-armed, broke-down man does the best he can.”
Avery pointed at him. “The Lord took away your arm,” he said. “He sent his holy agent to chop it off so that the blood gusheth, and he threw it to the fish for all your whoring and your sins. I know, I know. I was a holy agent of the Lord in my time, and I fed the fish with other men’s sins. I know, I know.”
“The hell you do,” Cole said. “I lost that arm in the big hurricane of ’35, and you ask anybody in Key West if that ain’t the truth. You got no call to talk to me that way.”
“How do you want me to talk?” Avery said. “The Lord is in me, and he tells me how to talk. The Devil is in the flesh and the Lord is in the spirit, and they war with each other. They war back and forth, and the Devil whispers evil to me and the Lord tells me how to answer him. Do you want me to refuse the Lord?”
I don’t guess Cole made any more sense out of that than I did, but one thing was sure—Cole didn’t bother me again when Avery was around. He scared easy, Cole did, and Avery was enough to scare anybody when he really got going. And after that he even got to be kind of friendly with Avery. Cole was one of those people who right away tries to get friendly with anybody scares him because it looks like the safest thing to do. A couple of times after that I heard him and Avery talking to each other on the porch while I was in bed, and they were still at it when I fell asleep. And it sounded real friendly.
When Avery got too much for me I would head off down the beach to the cove, because that was one place he didn’t show up. It was hard going over the dunes, and he wasn’t that crazy. So I would go to the cove and tell Sebastiano all about Avery, and he would shake his head and say, “Wonderful. Wonderful,” meaning that the way Avery talked about things and the way he was so religious was hard to believe. Sebastiano wasn’t much on religion himself and never went to church any more except on Easter. He said it was no use anyhow, because God made the world like a watch and wound it up so it would start running and then went off someplace and left it, which was why it was such a mess. I thought about that sometimes, but I wasn’t sure. It seemed to make sense, but if Sebastiano was wrong and God was around close-by it would be all kinds of sinful to think so.
Then all of a sudden it wasn’t a case of talking to Sebastiano about Avery any more or just thinking it was nice to have Avery around because he made things liven up. It got serious, and it happened so quick that I couldn’t believe it at first. And the funny thing was that it happened at the cove where everything big in my life had happened up to then. I guess there was something about the cove that made things happen in it, because they sure enough did.
And this was the biggest.
SEVEN
The way it went, Avery finally came out to the cove where I was with Sebastiano. He didn’t come right up to us but stopped quite a ways off and sat down on top of a dune with his knees pulled up and his arms around them, and he watched us. I told Sebastiano who he was, and Sebastiano said, “He looks like a sad one. He looks like someone who lives with the Devil. He will cook his brains out sitting in the sun without a hat on. I don’t think he is used to it.”
“Oh, he’s used to it,” I said. “Anyhow, he always looks sad.”
So we tried not to pay attention, but it wasn’t easy with Avery sitting and staring at us like an old sea gull on a log. After a while Sebastiano said, “He wants to be alone with you.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. Watch. As soon as I go away he will come down here to be with you. Would you be afraid if I left you alone with him?”
“Why should I be?”
“Because of the way he looks at you. But don’t worry. I’ll be in my house if you need me,” as if he could stand up against Avery for a minute, little dried-up thing that he was.
He went off to his shack, waving his hand at me and saying, “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” and as soon as he was inside, Avery came walking up. I sat there looking at my magazine, making believe not to notice him.
“What were you and that man talking about?” he said.
“I don’t know. A lot of things.”
“He was talking about me,” Avery said. “He gave you a warning against me. He said I was accursed.”
“He did not. And you leave him out of this. He happens to be a very good friend of mine.”
“But I am accursed,” Avery said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. “It is the flesh, the flesh, and there is no escape from it. I must live with it all my days.”
“That’s mighty lucky for you,” I told him. “You’d look awful funny going around like an old fish skeleton.”
He never knew when you were joking. “The skeleton and the flesh are the same,” he said. “Only the spirit is different. What are you reading? It looks like a sinful book full of naked men and women.”
“It is not. It’s a movie magazine and nobody’s naked in it. They don’t let you show naked people in movie magazines.”
“It’s sinful,” he said. “Don’t you know what’s sinful?” and before I could stop him he put his dirty work shoe on it and ground it into the sand. It was an old one with a lot of pictures of Jimmy in it and getting all crumbly around the edges, and he was ruining it. I put my hand on his leg to push him off and you’d think a jellyfish had stung him, the way he moved back.
I said, “You quit that with my magazine. And you better stop carrying on so much, Avery. What makes you like that anyhow?”
“I am what I am. The war between the spirit and the flesh is endless. See, the war is all around us,” he said and swung his arm back and forth as if there was really something there besides the sand and water and reef and Sebastiano’s shack, only there wasn’t. “See how Satan and the Lord of Hosts battle! The flesh and the spirit war until Judgment Day, and I am a soldier in that war.”
I was getting used to that kind of talk. “Well, don’t go soldiering up and down over me,” I told him. “If you can’t be nice, go away and bother somebody else.”
“I’m going away,” he said. “At the end of the week the barge will be fixed, and I’m going away to New York. I want us to get married, so you can come with me.”
It wasn’t only that it was so sudden, it was the way he said it. Not like asking somebody to get married, but hating her.
“Married?” I said. “You and me get married?”
“There’s room on the barge for two. And I make enough money to keep a wife.”
“You and me married?” I said, still trying to get this straight in my head. “But you’re an old man, Avery. You’re older than Cole is.”
“What has Cole to do with it? I talked to him and he said he would not stand in my way.”
“You mean Cole said it was all right for me to marry you?”
“He said he would not stand in my way.”
“And Let
tie?”
“Lettie is a woman. She is a wife. My father had such a wife, too, and she devoured him because he prayed for the Lord’s guidance instead of hers. That is how women are. They will devour a man if they can, but he must not let them. He must look to the Lord.”
“Maybe so, but you better not let Lettie hear that kind of talk.”
“She has heard it. I told it to her and she listened.”
“You mean that Lettie and Cole both said we could get married?”
“Yes. But it must be done quick, because the barge is leaving at the end of the week, and I must go to New York.”
I believed him about Cole and Lettie. No matter what else was wrong with him he was dead against lying, so I had to believe him. And I could tell it left everything right up to me. I said as nice as I could, “Well, it’s good of you to ask, Avery, but I don’t see it. Whoever I figured on getting married to, it sure enough wasn’t a poor old man.”
Avery looked at me for a long time without saying a word. Then he said in a whisper so I could hardly hear him, “I have money.”
“Maybe so, but not enough for me.”
“I have money,” he said, as if it killed him to think about it. “I have money.”
“Now look,” I said, and I pointed to the magazine where it was open to a picture. It was one of my favorite pictures of Jimmy because he was wearing that tuxedo he hardly ever wore, and he looked wonderful in it. Only thing that spoiled it was the girl with him. She was a real nothing, but she was wearing this beautiful, mink coat and she was smiling at him over the collar. “You see that,” I said and I put my finger right on the coat so he’d understand. “Any man I marry old enough to be my pa has got to buy me a coat like that. Not a young good-looking man, because I’ll take him the way he comes. But an old man’s got to buy me a real mink coat like that. You think you have money enough for it?”
The Winter After This Summer Page 22